Transsion Holdings to shift manufacturing base to India

China’s Transsion Holdings, the largest handset player in Africa, plans to shift phone manufacturing from the continent and China to India.Gulveen Aulakh | ET Bureau | April 20, 2016, 10:22 IST

China’s Transsion Holdings, the largest handset player in Africa, plans to shift phone manufacturing from the continent and China to India as it charts out entry plans into the fastest growing smartphone market in the world, which includes targeting the low-end segment.

The company, which operates in Africa through three brands - Tecno, Itel and Infinix - and leads the feature phone segment, will launch in India by the end of June with Itel smartphones, followed by Infinix by the year end and Tecno by end of the fiscal flowing into 2017.

Its to-be-launched phones-three models each in the feature and smartphone segments-will be priced in the Rs 700-10,000 range with features such as front camera on feature phones and quick charging, entering a segment dominated mainly by Indian home-bred players such as Micromax, Lava, Intex, Karbonn and Maxx in an intensely competitive market.

Feature phones still make up around 60% of the Indian handset market, but the proportion is fast getting skewed in favour of smartphones. “The idea is to shift the whole manufacturing to India over a period of time,” said Sudhir Kumar, chief executive officer of Itel India, part of parent Transsion Holdings. The first move will be a factory in Noida, for which the company will acquire land.

Investment plans for the factory will be finalised by June end, following which it will begin manufacturing locally. The company will also explore setting up more manufacturing units near port areas from where phones will be exported to other countries, including markets of Africa. “We are exploring Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh,” Kumar added, without giving any timeline when full manufacturing will move to India.